From the Left to Sanity | Amala Ekpunobi | EP 317

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So, an activist seems to me to be someone who hypothetically advocates for the oppressed, which is already a moral danger. It's because, like, what the hell made you advocate for the oppressed? Did they elect you as why are you the spokesman, and what gives you that moral virtue? So, you know, those are major questions. But also it comes with this temptation because if you're an activist, you're almost always against something. You're always identifying the problem with the world as being something that some other person who isn't good like you is doing.

And then what we do is we present young people in high school and in university with the notion that, well, there's if you really care about the world, there's nothing more honorable than you could do, that you could possibly do than to become an activist. And I really kind of think that in some sense there are almost no lower callings than activist. I think it's within our nature, especially as young people, to get obsessed with this idea of radical transformation and this lure of transformation.

And it wasn't until I met Dave Rubin, who I'm sure you're familiar with, and he put out this quote of, you know, when I was on this side of things I was trying to control the world. Now that I'm out of it, I'm trying to understand the world. And that's something that a lot of young people are not obsessed with. They don't want to understand the world and their place within it. They feel a sense of discomfort and they want to attribute that sense of discomfort to something else and find what is a common enemy. And it's really easy to find a common enemy if you listen to anybody who is obsessed with this woke ideology.

[Music] Hello, everyone, on YouTube and its associated platforms and podcasts. I'm talking today to Amala Epinobi. She was a radical leftist activist as a young person and has undergone quite a political and philosophical transformation in recent years. So we're going to talk to her about that and about her work with PragerU. Today, she's an American YouTube commentator, as I said, working under the PragerU brand. Her channel, Unapologetic, has amassed over half a million subscribers in a very short time, by the way spearheaded initially by her story.

Her mother is a left-wing pundit who works in professional fundraising. Amala grew up fully believing in leftist ideology before having a radical change in thought recognizing the hate coming from those around her who were tolerant. She made a hard choice to confront her bosses in a leftist organization on these thoughts and was not only shut down but belittled by being told, "You don't even realize how oppressed you are!" This was the final straw. From here, she left her workplace, dove into her own education on the founding fathers and how the institutions were originally designed in America and how social media works. Using these new skills in tandem, she launched a conservative TikTok channel of all things and found herself going viral regularly.

It wasn't long after she joined PragerU as the host of her own show. Raised in a far-left activist household, 22-year-old Amala Epinobi was once a student organizer for the left, and unanswered questions and a search for the truth led her to a complete ideological transformation, passionately sharing her new conservative values online. Amala became a viral social media sensation. She is now the host of PragerU's popular show, Unapologetic with Amala. She inspires millions of young people every day to discover the truth, defend their values, and lead better lives.

I met her at a PragerU gala about a month ago, it's December 2022 at the moment, so a month ago would have put us in November I think that's about right. And I was there talking to Dennis Prager, and she had a speech after me, and it was really quite compelling. I thought it would be very interesting to talk to Amala on my podcast as a consequence. She's quite young. She's made a bit of a splash online — maybe more than a bit — and so when I listened to her talk, I thought, well here's someone who seems to have a clue and who's probably going somewhere. So let's find out exactly who she is, and so that's the plan today.

I want to get to know her a little bit and to walk all of you through it. So let's start with what you're doing now. You're working for PragerU, and that's a very evil thing to do, as you know full well. And so I'm quite curious about how you — how that came about, and how old are you?

I'm 22 at the moment. Right, okay, okay, so you're not a — you're just — but you're out of that — you're out of pop hood a little bit anyways. Yeah, so okay. How did you come to start doing videos for PragerU? Tell me exactly what you're doing at PragerU.

Sure, yeah! So at the moment, my job title is PragerU personality, which I guess a student, but I have some sort of personality, and what that involves now is I do podcasting and social media content and just talk about cultural issues, today's politics, and news from a young person's perspective and particularly a young conservative leaning perspective. So that's what I do now, and PragerU found me because I started making videos on the internet about a journey that I had from being what I consider to be a really radical leftist to now sort of a right-of-center person.

Right, right. So you're a conservative personality? Those two words haven't gone together that well during the entire span of my life, so that's kind of a funny thing altogether. And so how often are you making — how often are you making videos for PragerU?

Every single day we put out content, so we're constantly staying on our toes and keeping up with everything that's going on in the world, and that's our daily life right now is just looking at what's happening, looking at the conversations that people are having and what's trending, and then hopefully giving a reasonable perspective on it.

Right, so how much content are you producing every day?

At least, I would say, three short-form videos that are about 60 seconds long, as well as one long-form video that will be anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour, and then we do a live podcast on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays that goes for about an hour.

Oh yeah, okay, okay. And on the short-form — so those are about 60 seconds long?

Yep, yep! We'll pick a trending topic or a news story and then just give you a 60-second rundown of what's happening, as well as a little bit of opinion on it.

Right, and so what platforms are you using for the short forms?

Everything! We're on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, you name it, we're there.

Are you on TikTok?

Yes, TikTok. I have an up and down relationship with TikTok as I get banned probably every other week for the content that I put out.

Congratulations! Being banned by the Chinese Communists is always a really good thing.

Yeah, we should be running a favor in spades!

Yes, I agree. Yes, yes, definitely.

And so where do you have the biggest following?

My biggest following is now on YouTube. My TikTok account is currently banned; that would have been my biggest following at about 640k, I believe, but now we've reached that on YouTube.

Oh well, congratulations!

And how fast are you growing on YouTube?

Well, we started our channel I want to say about in April of this year. So that's — how quickly? It's been about nine months.

Oh, and you said you were making videos before PragerU picked you up. What platforms were you using for those videos? When did you start doing that?

I started out on TikTok, of all platforms, and I want to say I started there at the end of 2019, and in a matter of months managed to amass a few hundred thousand followers because I think I was speaking to a perspective that people weren't used to on the platform. I have a particular look being a biracial female; I think that's not to be ignored, having a factor in my growing so quickly on these platforms.

But TikTok is where things really started to take off.

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Yeah, so what do you think you were doing that made what you were saying relevant, vital to people? I mean, you pointed to a couple of things: your youth and your biracial status. And I suppose that the combination of those two things and the fact that you were offering a counter-narrative.

But that doesn't seem to me to be enough. Like, when you see that kind of explosive growth across multiple platforms, you have to think that you're saying something in the right way for the moment. And so what is it about what you're doing that is attracting attention? Is it mostly positive attention? Are you getting a lot of trouble?

And yeah, so that would also be in your personal life as well as your online life because those aren't the same thing. So what are you doing right?

What am I doing right? That's a big question! You know, when I started out on the platform, it was just a leisurely thing. I unfortunately downloaded TikTok as a form of entertainment and started scrolling through this curated For You page, which of course takes in your demographics and realizes somewhat of who you are as a person and then feeds you videos that they think you'll like.

And the videos that I was being fed were just a lot of leftist radical ideology, really reducing me down to my gender, my race, talking about how pivotal it was that I was to be a member of the feminist movement or of Black Lives Matter. And I saw that and thought, wow, it's very interesting that this app took in my demographics, and this is what it fed me. I wonder if there's anybody saying anything contrary to this.

So one day I took out my phone, and I filmed a video talking about how I used to be a former leftist, and now I'm on the other side of things, and part of me sort of died off, but spoke to it a little bit and my videos started taking off purely due to hatred. People were very upset at me espousing these views, and I got every single name you can think of for what I was doing.

And then, oh, that's fine.

Yeah, yeah, it was something that I expected by virtue of having been on that side of things already. I knew what I was going to walk into with that, but with that came just this wave of support of people seeing the hate that I was getting and wanting to be a part of the counter-narrative of that.

Right, well that's interesting because it's certainly been the case that in respect to my rise to notoriety, let's say, the most vitriolic attacks have been the ones that have done me the most good, certainly. And that's pretty weird, you know, it isn't necessarily how you look at life. But the first video that really went viral in relation to my political activity, I put up a couple of videos criticizing the University of Toronto's idiot HR policies, you know, predicated on diversity, inclusivity, and equity, and their half-begotten dimwit interpretation of human psychological functioning.

The idea that you could use explicit anti-racist training to overcome implicit racist bias, which is like the most preposterous thing ever from a psychological perspective. I criticized that in this compelled speech law in Canada. Then some activists cornered me. I'd been speaking at a free speech rally, which I didn't arrange by the way, and I got a lot of trouble there, a lot of white noise generation, a lot of almost violent pushback from the hypothetical radical left.

And then a bunch of activists cornered me on the way into my building, my office building, and they filmed the encounter, talking about all the Nazis that were at my free speech rally. And first of all, I don't know what it's like in the United States at the moment, although I've been there quite a bit, there aren't any Nazis in Canada. That's just not a Canada thing. I don't know anyone who knows anyone who's ever met anyone who claims to be a Nazi. Like it's just not an issue. And so that was completely preposterous.

Anyways, they filmed this encounter, you know, claiming that I was attracting all sorts of demented right-wingers, and that went viral. The idea was to damage my reputation, but exactly the opposite happened. And then I've had a number of encounters with journalists that have been definitely — the journalists were just — they're real vipers, you know, they're the sort of people. In fact, one of them eventually admitted that this is what she was doing. This was Nelly Bowles, who used to work for the New York Times.

She actually wrote a public apology, although not specifically to me, saying that, as a New York Times journalist, she made her career by going out to purposefully destroy people. And so talking to journalists like that, it's really like walking through a nest of vipers because the people who do that sort of thing ask their questions in a way that is designed to make you say something that will be fatal to your reputation, permanently, so that their status can be elevated as the person that outed you.

But interestingly enough, just to wrap this story up, is every time that's happened, although it made things shaky for a couple of weeks or a couple of months afterwards, the positive consequences have eventually been far greater than the negative consequences. And so that being attacked, you know, that can be — well first of all, it forces you to get your arguments in line, but it also can be a real — well, as you said, you know, your sense is that had you not been subject to all that abuse, you probably wouldn't have grown as quickly.

Yeah, all of the pivotal moments in what has been a very short career so far have been when people have come at me with hatred and vitriol and painted this really evil picture of me, and then people who want to believe that and want to see what I have to say in order to throw hate at me end up finding my message and eventually having this reaction of, wow, she's really not that bad. Because I understand the people that I speak out against. I come forward and say, here's why you believe what you believe, and with everything you're seeing right now, I completely understand it because I was there. I'm not going to shout at you about how you're stupid or brainwashed because, you know, that was me four years ago even.

So I try to approach all the conversations I have with that perspective, so people are expecting to meet this really evil bulldog abrasive individual and then they find my videos and go, oh, it's not at all what these hate comments were saying. It's totally different.

Yeah, well, so when this first viral video went out, I already had about 150 hours of YouTube content up because I posted a lot of my lectures because I was playing around with YouTube at that point, trying to figure out how useful it was as a broad communication platform. And so what happened, again parallels your experience, was people went to check out my YouTube video because they were assuming that I was, you know, foaming at the mouth and found out that — well, this is actually literally the case.

I probably have 200 hours of lectures up. Might be more than that now. And the people who've been interested, say, in mischaracterizing me and also in taking me out haven't been able to find in all of those hours one single statement that even taken out of context would indicate that, you know, I have any of the nefarious notions or motivations that have been described to me.

And so what's so interesting about that, it's really powerful in a paradoxical way because people go looking for you, let's say, assuming that you're some kind of junior monster. So not only do they find out that's not true, they find out that you're being pilloried, not by people, not only by people who are lying and who are corrupt and malevolent because of their lies, but they're doing something worse than lying because, you know, if you're a skillful liar, you tell a lie that's very close to the truth right?

Because it can kind of slip by. But there are anti-truths which are different than lies, and an anti-truth is something that couldn't be farther away from the truth if you tried to make it farther away. And so you had the benefit of that, is that you were pilloried by people who were telling anti-truths about you and then people come and see, oh my God, she's nothing like I was led to believe.

And then that starts to raise serious doubts in the back of their mind. It's like just what the hell is going on here? Because this isn't just a lie! This is the complete opposite of reality itself.

So that's very interesting too. It's very interesting to watch that emerge.

All right, so you started working on TikTok and you started to get a lot of hatred and then a lot of attention. What happened after TikTok?

Within a matter of months, I received a message on my Instagram from somebody working here at PragerU, and they said, you know, we've seen your videos and we're very interested in you coming out here and telling your story. Is it possible that we could get you on a call?

And I got on a call and told my story over the matter of a couple of minutes, and they said, let's fly you out to Los Angeles, and we want you to do a video for a series we have called Stories of Us, where you sit for an hour, you tell us your story, and we will chop that up and put that out to the internet.

And I got here, I met with many of the higher-ups who were working here, and on the second day of my trip, I was offered a job. They said, would you like to come here and do this full-time, start making your videos, and putting them out on social media, and we'll support you and resource that for you.

And at the time, that had really not crossed my mind. I was working at a medical clinic as a tech and had every intention of continuing my school and going into nursing and midwifery. So I thought about it for a second and thought, you know, this is a pretty important opportunity that I get, and that it's just sitting at my feet right now, and I'd be pretty dumb to not take them up on it.

So I dropped everything and moved out to LA within a matter of weeks.

Yeah, well, good for you! I mean, yeah, when opportunity comes knocking like that, then you know, it’s sensible to take advantage of the situation in the most positive possible way.

What's it been like working with the Prager crew?

Oh, it's been great! I think the best thing about working here is that I have the freedom to really talk about whatever I want to talk about on any given day. And I think it's very rare to have a job that supports you in that sense.

So I really wake up every day and get to look at things that I'm passionate about speaking about and then bring that to the forefront for other people to hear.

There's certainly a lot of pressure that comes with it, as I'm sure you feel as well. You want to be on the right side of things, you want to speak to things that are true, and that can be difficult because we make mistakes, and sometimes we're wrong, and I'm very young to be doing this. So that's something that stays on my brain a lot.

But other than that, it's a really great job.

How do you keep your ego under control?

Because I know how fallible I am as a human being. I think that's what keeps me in control, and I try to stay hyper aware of my shortcomings and my blind spots, and I really approach things with the sense that I could be wrong about anything I'm saying on any given day, and I want to have that sort of care for myself so I'll give that care to other people.

And it really keeps me humble because there are many times where I'm wrong or I'll come at a subject matter feeling super defensive about it or needing something to be right, and I don't realize that until far later.

So I try to keep that in mind whenever I'm doing anything.

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Yeah, well, it hasn't been that long since you've done a 180 on your belief system, and so that's also got to be kind of paramount in your mind.

Let's talk about that a little bit.

So, when I was a kid, 14, I worked with a woman named Sandy Nortley and her husband, Grant Notley. And Grant was the member of the Legislative Assembly for my home constituency—my riding—in Fairview in Alberta. And he was the only opposition member in the entire Alberta Parliament essentially, and he was a socialist. The entire Province was conservative, except for him. He was a socialist.

Now, the reason he was elected in that riding wasn't because he was a socialist. In fact, he was elected, I would say, in spite of the fact that he was a socialist. He was actually a good man, and everybody knew that and trusted him.

And so I worked for the NDP, that new Democratic Party, for about three years, and I was a good friend of his wife. She was the librarian at our local junior high school and she introduced me to serious literature, and I really liked her. She was a real good mentor, kind of an eccentric New England woman quite well educated by the standards of the little town that I grew up in.

And so she pointed me to Huxley and Orwell and Solzhenitsyn and Ayn Rand as well, to her credit because of course Rand is no socialist. And then, you know, because I had access to her and her husband, and her husband Grant was the leader of the Socialists in Alberta, he had access to premiers of Alberta and the national leader of the NDP.

Over about a three-year period, I got to be a fly on the wall in many meetings between senior labor leaders and senior socialist leaders. This is kind of Fabian socialism that's got a British twist; it isn't really derived from the same, say, school of thought that the Communists were derived from.

And I stopped working for them when I was about 17 for reasons that I'll go into. But, I got to say a few things about the Socialists of that time. First of all, most of them had been labor leaders, you know? So a lot of them were working class guys, mostly guys, not all — mostly who, and this was the leaders, who had worked themselves up the working class hierarchy and then had adopted political responsibilities in one form or another.

Most of those guys, when I listened to them, I actually had a fair bit of respect for them and admired them. I actually thought that they were genuinely doing their best to put forward the interests of the working class.

And at that time, the Conservative Party in Canada was pretty much middle class, upper middle class guys in three-piece suits, you know, banker types. It was clear the Conservative Party was a voice of the corporate world. And then the Liberals, who were genuine centrist liberals, sort of played both ends against the middle, and they did that quite successfully. So everybody knew where the political parties stood in some real sense. They were different.

And the Socialists did advocate for the working class, but even then, you know, I used to go to the party conventions and there were a lot of activists there, and I didn't like the activists at all. They really made me nervous.

I thought, and then I read George Orwell, and George Orwell talked about socialist activists back in the 1930s in the UK. What did he call them? Tweed-wearing, leather patch jacket champagne socialists. Like, what the hell do you guys have to do with the poor?

And the answer was nothing. You don't love the poor; you just hate the rich. Now, the leaders I saw, they liked the working class, you know. They were advocating on their behalf. But these activist types, they were motivated by pretty much nothing but resentment.

And that really grated on me, and I stopped working in anything that was political, well, pretty much from that point onward. So I think it's really easy for young people to be attracted to leftist ideas because, first of all, young people are looking for a cause. And second, without much reflection, it seems obvious that we should be advocating for the oppressed.

And then, of course, the leftists always say that that's what they're doing and so given that your first moral impulse might be to advocate on the part of the disaffected, then it seems appropriate that if you were attempting to be moral that you would gravitate towards those who claim to be speaking for the dispossessed.

The question is, are they really speaking for them? So why do you think now you also have said — and you need to explain this to people — that your mother was and is a left-wing political activist. But so you have that reason for having been hooked into the ideology, let's say. Do you want to expand on that a little bit? Let's walk through your biography a bit here and talk about the philosophical reasons you were attracted to it and also the personal reasons that this particular idiom.

Sure, yeah, absolutely. So I was raised by a single mother for much of my life. My parents divorced when I was around six years old. So my mom took care of me and two siblings, and through her single motherhood, really, I was super involved with her work. If we got a day off school, we were gonna go to work with mom, and I was going to see exactly what she was doing.

And what she was doing was fundraising for a left-leaning organization out in Orlando, Florida. So that was her day in and day out. She's politically quite obsessed with virtually everything that's going on in today's day and age. So I would go to work with my mom, and she would give me markers to write on posters. Little did I know those posters were going to be used in protests that they were staging in the city.

So very deeply entrenched in that from a really young age. And my mom happens to be white, which I don't find to be particularly important, but it is important in that she taught me from a really young age that because I was biracial, life might be a little bit harder for me living in this country due to its history and how that history is reflected in the present.

So I think more so than doing good for the world, I was attached to this sense of victimhood, and I thought that it was really pivotal to my identity. So I was a really angry young person. I was getting in arguments all the time with kids who knew nothing about politics about political issues, and I grew up in a very small rural conservative town. So arguments were ripe for the picking with anybody I chose.

And anger was the first thing that I think got me attached to the movement, but then it was going to my mother's work. And like you said, there were a lot of working class people involved. During the hurricanes in Florida, they would do food banking and give out food to the needy. So it was a lot of very radical policy prescription mixed in with pretty pragmatic helping of people who happened to be lower income and living in lower income communities.

So I think I just got my wires crossed in thinking that because we were doing good on a small scale, that meant that these radical prescriptions that we were calling for were also good.

Yeah, well, that's a critical point, you know, because, okay, so let's delve into that a little bit and think it through. So, look, one of the — it's definitely the case that one of the sources of sophisticated morality is compassion, right?

Although we're making a big mistake in the modern world by elevating compassion to the — what would you call it? — the status of unique virtue because there's lots of other more primordial building blocks of virtue that are as important as compassion. So, for example, everyone's enjoined now to not be judgmental. And that really means to be casually dismissive, and I do think casually dismissive is a mistake.

But judgmental, discriminating, that's not a mistake, that's a virtue because to be judgmental and to be discriminating means that you dispense with what isn't worthy and you pursue what is worthy and truthful is a virtue. And, well, we can start with that.

Sensitive to beauty is a virtue. All of those things have to be melded into higher order virtues, but compassion leaps out to dominate. And so it's easy to assume that if you're motivated by something like a reflexive compassion that everything you think and want is therefore both good, practical, necessary, and morally justifiable.

Worse than that, and that might be the most toxic element of it, is that if you believe that you're motivated by compassion and compassion is the highest virtue, and then you run into anyone who opposes your views, then it's super easy to demonize them. And that, that's also a huge problem.

Now I think that's rooted to some degree in the neurology of maternal compassion. So think about it this way: you know, when you're a mother of a young infant, you should be 100% compassionate, so let's say zero to six months because the infant is completely helpless.

An infant can't move! So an infant can't be autonomous at all before that young person is capable of voluntary movement, right? So there's just no autonomy without voluntary movement. So, until children can crawl, they're completely dependent on their mother.

And what that means is their mother has to be a hundred percent compassionate because everything the child wants when it's in that infantile stage has to be dealt with with no argument, one hundred percent of the time. And more than that, so because the child is so vulnerable, the cost of labeling something as a predator that isn't a predator is very low.

But the cost of labeling something that is a predator not a predator is very high. And so along with that overarching compassion comes this proclivity to over-label things as predatory, and that's protective. But it does not scale well into the political landscape, I don't think that we can scale an ethos of compassion.

I don't think you can actually scale it beyond the family. Ben Shapiro, I was talking to him about this recently, and he said something quite witty, which was that, well, at home, he's a communist, right, with his kids.

Well, it's from each according to their ability, to each according to their need. Sure, and that's right because with your children, you're trying to keep things equitable in terms of outcome even. And you are calling on them to deliver what they can, and you provide to them what they need.

And so, and then it's an open question, especially if you're not particularly mature in your thinking, it's an open question, well, why can't we use exactly those principles to govern, well, large corporations or educational institutions or the world as a totality? And the answer to that seems to me to be something like, the fundamental — the most fundamental feminine ethos does not scale.

It's a local ethos! It's for infants and family members fundamentally, and I think that's associated on the personality front with the distinction between agreeableness and conscientiousness.

So, agreeableness is the compassionate temperamental dimension, and women are more agreeable than men quite reliably, although the difference isn't huge, it's big at the extremes but it's not particularly large in the middle.

If you pick a random man and a random woman out of the population and you ask which one was more compassionate, if you pick the woman, you'd be right sixty percent of the time, but you'd be wrong 40! So you can see that there's still a lot of overlap, but agreeableness does not predict success in the broader world. Conscientiousness does.

And conscientiousness is a much colder virtue, right? It seems — because a conscientious person will call you out on your misbehavior even if it hurts your feelings, let's say, and a conscientious person is someone who will forestall immediate pleasure or even undergo a certain amount of immediate discomfort for a longer-term gain. And our well-functioning institutions seem to be predicated on an ethic of conscientiousness and not an ethic of compassion, and I don't think we've got that straightened out at all.

Like we certainly don't communicate that idea to young people, say, look, there's a place for compassion, but it's the local, and it's the local and infantile in some sense.

And then that brings up another question, you know, and nobody's been able to have a serious discussion about this: is women have really entered the political sphere en masse in the last 60 years, let's say? Yeah. I don't think anybody would dispute that particular idea. And we know there's all sorts of masculine political pathologies, right?

Maybe a overt proclivity towards a kind of aggressive narcissism that might result in the creation of stupid Wars for egotistical reasons that might be an expression of masculine psychopathology on the political front. But no one — we haven't had a serious discussion at all about feminine psychopathology on the political front, and I think we miss a whole — I've been trying to formulate it as something like narcissism of compassion.

You know, the idea that just because you're feeling maternal, that your love can envelop the whole world, and now by fiat, all your political opinions are correct merely because you know you feel sorry for kittens. So I'm not making light of that.

Right? Well, you get that — exactly! That sort of reflexive compassion is not a moral virtue. And the reason for that is that moral virtues are a lot more sophisticated.

Okay, so we've gone over some of the ideas why young people might be attracted to the compassionate ideal. Now, you used to go to work with your mom. You were pulled into this. She had — do you — okay. And then so when did the crack start to show?

And you were getting in a lot of arguments. That's interesting too as an activist type because that's a weird loop to be in too because your mother was teaching you, according to your own testimony, let's say, to view yourself as a victim for, let's say, for your racial status even though she was white herself.

And that also compelled you to argue with people and my suspicions are that why wouldn't that reinforce your feeling of alienation and isolation? Like, you know what I mean? So were you in a loop because of that?

Yes! Oh, absolutely! It was a complete loop of believing this, getting into an argument with somebody that reinforced the ideas that I already had, and at every fork in the road that I had come to with that that was a little hypocritical or maybe there's something wrong there, I didn't seek out trying to find the cracks in what I was believing. I just sought reinforcement.

So whenever I was in an argument with somebody, it wasn't really about the crux of what I was saying or what I was advocating for. It was always, they're a racist, they're a misogynist, so anything that they say doesn't even matter, and I shouldn't even take into account as far as questioning my own self and having a healthy degree of skepticism.

So I was in this constant loop of, yes, I believe this, this is what my identity is. If somebody argues with me, it's because they're not on the same page as me, and they in fact hate something about my identity, and it just looped back and forth.

Three years.

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Well, people who are listening might be asking, well, why should you subject your own beliefs to criticism? And like when I wrote my first book, which is called Maps of Meaning, I spent a lot of time writing it, but then I spent a lot of time with hammer and tongs trying to break every sentence.

So I'd read a lot of Nietzsche by that point, and Nietzsche described himself as someone who philosophized with a hammer. And so what he meant by that, first of all, was that he was capable of delivering devastating philosophical blows, which is certainly the case.

I don't know if there's ever been a philosopher who was more explosive than Nietzsche in the psychological and social sense. But it also meant that whenever he put forward a proposition, he would spend a tremendous amount of time trying to throw every possible argument he could formulate at that proposition to see if he could break it. And then he'd only keep the propositions he couldn't break.

So I tried to do that with Maps of Meaning. I figure I rewrote every sentence about 50 times trying to see, is there any way, is there any argument I can come up with that will get underneath this proposition and make it feel weak and unsteady to me? And I only kept the — now you might say, well, why bother with all that? Why not just be comfortable in your beliefs?

And the answer is, look, there's going to come a time in your life for sure — it might happen every day to some degree — where what you believe and how you predicate your actions is going to be subjected to unbelievably severe stress. And that might be an argument, you know, or especially if the argument gets vicious and intense, or if it's a long-term argument in the relationship, or it might be that you encounter something tragic in your life.

If your beliefs aren't stress-tested like in some serious manner, then they're going to fall apart just when you most need them, and then you're going to be in serious trouble.

So finding yourself in one of these loops where you don't test your beliefs and you just discount everything that might be a challenge because of the hypothetical, you know, quasi-satanic nature of the person who's questioning you means that you're allowing yourself to live inside a house of cards essentially.

And then, as soon as you are stressed in some real sense, you're going to just fall apart.

Now you said you were miserable and angry, and so was that most of the time?

Yeah, it was. It was most of the time, and that could have been due to other factors, but I do think what I believed was really a part of that, and the lack of true testing of what I believed. I think a lot of people misconstrue a test with having a cause of stress, and I think the more you test your beliefs, the more comfortable you will be in them.

So now I'm way more comfortable going into back and forth with people and debating, whereas before, I wasn't. And I think it's because I was really insecure in what it was that I believed, but so confident in espousing it, and just so strong in being really forthright.

I was the person who would wear those activist t-shirts to school every day knowing that it was going to rile people up and that it was going to cause some sort of discussion to happen.

So what really made me upset in the life that I was leading was just waking up every day looking at the world through this lens of injustice. You know, every cross look was racist, every off-comment was misogyny, and when you view the world that way and you're looking for those things, not just saying that you believe that they are real, but looking for them, everything you see is going to be that thing.

So right, you're also in an evil place.

Right? Well, you also put yourself in a position. Yeah, that's interesting too because you put yourself in a position then when even when casual interactions, let's call them micro-aggressions for lack of a better word, and casual misunderstandings are instantly elevated in your perception to the status of high moral crimes.

So it isn't some — it isn't just that someone's annoyed at you or someone's just having a bad day. It's that you're dealing with a racist or a misogynist, right, which is a core evaluation of their character.

And I can give you an example of just how bad it was because people will think about things and go, well, that probably was a micro-aggression and it probably was racism. But I was so obsessed with it that as a kid, I had learned that if somebody wanted to touch my hair, which is very curly and very odd for the place that I was living in because I was surrounded by a lot of white people with straight hair, I was told that if somebody asked to touch my hair or somebody came and wanted to look at my braids, that was racism being played out in real time and that they were trying to express how different I was and really belittle me.

So this would happen all the time to me in school. Kids would walk up and go, oh, I love your curly hair! Can I touch your hair? And that was evil to me; that was racism shining right in my face.

So you can imagine probably how bad that was for me believing these things as a young person.

Yeah, yeah. Well, that — that's definitely interesting. That tone of voice that you used there when you were talking about those kids that would come up to you. When you mimic them, the way you mimic them was by acting out the vocal intonations of a curious kid, not as someone who's being mean.

So what do you now think those kids were doing? How do you look at — and what do you think would have been a better way for you to look at that when you were a kid?

Oh, the best way I could have looked at that as a child was, oh my gosh, somebody is displaying interest in me. How wonderful a thing that somebody saw something that was different to what they normally saw and felt the need to point that out and to ask me about it.

They were genuinely curious about how my hair came to be this way, and if I had viewed the world in that light, I would have been such a happy little child.

And unfortunately, I had the exact opposite experience.

Yeah, you know, I read a great book a long while back called Bullying: What We Know and What We Can Do About It. And you know we have this idea that bullies find kids who have something abnormal about them and then target them because of that abnormality.

But this gentleman, Dan Olweus, a great psychologist, pointed out that at least 75 percent of kids have some obvious let's call it deviation from the norm that could be picked out by a bully. You know it could be something as simple as wearing glasses or having red hair or being a little short, or being a little taller or being a little thin or being a little fat.

You know? You can just multiply the peculiarities endlessly. And that, in and of itself, isn't enough to generate bullying. The bullies tend to focus on an identifiable anomaly, but then they are looking for kids who overreact when they're teased a little bit.

And then it's that combination of sensitivity, hypersensitivity to provocation, plus perhaps an anomaly that makes someone into a bully victim.

And so, well you can see, you can kind of see there you have this situation where there was something about you, about your hair, that made you identifiably different. But the kids could have been both testing you and checking you out in a curious way. And then whether that would spiral into something that would be true bullying and intimidation would be dependent in large degree — to a large degree on your own reaction, right?

Yeah, and I've struggled with a long time for a long time of just going back and taking accountability for my part in things. And when I went through this journey of realizing, oh maybe I don't believe in this leftist sort of woke dogma, a lot of that time I spent blaming other people.

Why were people teaching me these things? What institutions were at play when it came to me getting this information? And I took no accountability for my part in being susceptible to the information and what made me want to believe these things.

Why was I ripe for the picking as far as a person who was willing to fall for some of the stuff that I was hearing?

And that's still something that I'm thinking through to this day.

Well, you did say something interesting, and this is probably worth diving into too. You said that despite the fact that your knowledge was shallow — well, you're not very old and you weren't, you know, 10 years ago particularly. You weren't very old despite your knowledge being shallow, and despite it not being your knowledge, you were very confident about displaying it.

And displaying it in some sense proudly.

And you know pride has always been regarded as one of the cardinal sins, and so it seems to me that part of what set you up for this, apart from the characteristics of your particular background, was also that there was something in it that was an appeal to like a prideful narcissism.

Right? And I'm not diagnosing you as a narcissist, right? Don't get that — don't get that wrong.

I'm really not. I'm — I'm trying to understand why — well, as you said, Carl Jung said, you know that every projection needed a hook. And so you always have to ask yourself, even if you were enticed down the garden pathway by woke educators and by your own mother to some degree, what was it in you that helped you respond in a way that made you even more vulnerable to that kind of propagandization than you might have otherwise been?

And you said you wore these shirts proudly. You were looking for a fight in some sense. So what do you think was at the bottom of that pride? What were you taking pride in?

Was it you standing up for the underdog? Like what is it that wearing those shirts was doing for you, do you think?

Yeah, I think I felt really different as a child growing up in the environment that I grew up in. And I always felt like I stood out regardless of what I did.

So I think I just leaned into that a little bit more and thought, okay, well, if I'm going to stick out for these things that I can't control, I'm going to take control of something, and I'm going to stand out even more.

And couple that with feeling very virtuous for doing it, I think it was just a recipe for disaster because it made me feel like I'm a good person doing a good thing plus I'm standing out, plus all these other people aren't willing to do this good thing that I'm doing, and I get to tell them about it in any given moment.

And it was just a mixture of feeling really insecure.

And yeah, well, so that's an interesting thing, eh? Because we all do believe, I think in some real sense, that a good person should do good things.

And some of that would be a certain amount of self-sacrifice for the benefit of others, you know?

And if you're sensible about that, you'd say, well, you shouldn't sacrifice yourself to the point of being a martyr because that becomes counterproductive.

But the problem with that goodness, I guess this is why there's an injunction in the gospels against praying in public, the problem with that virtue or that goodness is that you can start to trumpet it as a differentiating moral virtue, right?

And so you can start to use your hypothetical care for the poor and oppressed as a marker for your superior social status and the inviolability of your beliefs.

And so then it starts to move — you can see that there's a slippery slope there from compassionate virtue to overweening pride. And you said in your case it was also exaggerated by the fact that, well man, if you were going to be different, you know, if you were fated to be different in some ways than by God, you were gonna play that hand to its fullest.

And that's also an attraction, you know, and an adaptation.

Sure, yeah, and that’s exactly what happened. It was just me playing into something, but also being reinforced that it was right all the time. I was super involved in the activism that I was doing.

So when I wasn't at school, I go to work with my mom and volunteer there, and I ended up graduating high school, and I was so involved that I got a job at her organization.

So when we go back to that loop, it was just my own negativity and insecurity, my own willingness to want to be different for the sake of just being different, making myself feel virtuous, and doing so.

And then being reinforced by the adult structures that were around me for being a young person willing to do the work, which is really so often what we see with the David Hoggs out of March for Our Lives and the Greta Thunbergs.

It was just older people saying this is so great that you're doing it and you're just like Obama.

Oh yeah, a lot of people told me at the time, oh my God, oh my God!

Yeah, well you know, I was thinking about Greta last night, so it might be worth just talking about her a little bit.

So I was trying to put myself in her shoes. So imagine, first of all, that you're 13. And then imagine that you're a little on the autistic side.

And then imagine that you have a very domineering mother who's perfectly willing to use you for her political purposes. And then, so now she's instilled this terror into you that the world is coming to an apocalyptic end.

And that there are evil and malevolent forces conspiring to make that happen, and that basically constitutes the entire patriarchal structure of Western civilization, and all of its industry.

And so that's the background you come out of, and now you're 13. And what happens? You're 13.

Well, what happens is like 50-year-old adult male leaders all over the world fall at your feet and treat you like you're the Oracle of Delphi.

And so then, what the hell do you think if you're 13 and confused and a bit autistic and your mother's a bit domineering? You think, oh my God, all these things she's telling me that are so terrifying must be true because all these well-positioned men who run the world are treating the revelations of my childhood fear as if they're so important that they should be broadcast on every news station and should start to become fundamental government policy.

And so, like how the hell, how the hell would you possibly respond if you were 13 except with a massive magnification of your terrors?

Like oh, the world's in such bad shape that I, the 13-year-old autistic child from Scandinavia, now seem to be the leading oracle in the world on the environmental economic front. It's so sad for her!

I can't imagine how someone in that situation couldn't be on the edge of existential terror constantly.

Yeah, I relate to her a lot, and you know I feel a lot of compassion and sympathy for her mother as well because from my perspective with my mom having gone through this really twisted journey of having to come to her and say, you know what, that stuff that I learned when I was younger really did have a negative effect, and here's how.

And her just being shocked and that, oh, I'm so — you know, I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought I was doing the compassionate thing, and I thought I was alerting you to the snake that's sitting out in the front yard, and that's my responsibility as a mother to do that.

So I feel for Greta's mother. I feel for her and I also feel for the people who look at a young person and say, look at this young person leading the way and using the power of a 13-year-old, which is just really very much misplaced to push forward a movement.

But it is just a twisted, twisted cycle.

Yeah, well, I mean she's in an impossible situation because I don't see how she could possibly question herself or her doubts, given the unbelievably overwhelming response to her revelations.

So she, yeah, she's in an awful situation.

Okay, so we talked a little bit about the role that your own temptations played in setting you up for this propaganda, although you were pretty much surrounded by it too, which is, you know, that makes it also very difficult to, let's say, escape from.

So how old were you when you started working after school at your mom's organization and then how old were you when you started working for her full-time?

I was 15 when I had started volunteering and 17 when I started working full-time.

Okay, and you did that after you graduated from high school?

Yes, as soon as I graduated from high school, I thought, no college for me, let's make myself a full-time activist, and that's what I did.

Yeah, right, well, okay, that's — okay, a couple of things there. So another thing that really used to bother me at the universities, and I started to discuss this with some of my professional peers just before it became impossible for me to continue working at the University, we have this idea that we tell young people all the time, and I really do think this is an insidious invitation to their prideful narcissism, that the way — first of all, that they should be changing the world.

You know which is a lot to change for people who haven't even been able to live independently yet. And also that if you do want to change the world, which is what you should do and what you could do, the way you do that is by being an activist.

And activist has become professionalized since the mid-60s. And so an activist seems to me to be someone who hypothetically advocates for the oppressed, which is already a moral danger.

It's because like what the hell made you advocate for the oppressed? Did they elect you? Why are you the spokesman? And what gives you that moral virtue?

So, you know, those are major questions, but also it comes with this temptation because if you're an activist, you're almost always against something. Right?

You're against industry, you're against fossil fuels, you're against the patriarchy, you're against the racists. Like you're always identifying the problem with the world as being something that some other person who isn't good like you is doing.

And then what we do is we present young people in high school and in university with the notion that, well, if you really care about the world, there's nothing more honorable than you could do than to become an activist.

And I really kind of think that in some sense there are almost no lower calls than activist.

Yes, I would agree with you, and I think it's within our nature, especially as young people, to get obsessed with this idea of radical transformation and this lure of transformation.

And it wasn't until I met Dave Rubin, who I'm sure you're familiar with, and he put out this quote of, you know, when I was on this side of things I was trying to control the world. Now that I'm out of it, I'm trying to understand the world.

And that's something that a lot of young people are not obsessed with. They don't want to understand the world and their place within it. They feel a sense of discomfort, and they want to attribute that sense of discomfort to something else and find what is a common enemy.

And it's really easy to find a common enemy if you listen to anybody who is obsessed with this woke ideology.

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Okay, so maybe someone might level a criticism at you and say, okay, look, you know, for a long time you were a left-wing activist, but now you're just a right-wing activist. And so what?

How would you defend yourself? How do you defend yourself? Because I'm sure that idea has occurred to you. How do you investigate that charge? And what do you think is different about you working for PragerU, which is a well-known hypothetically right-wing, you know, conspiratorial organization, which seems in some sense activist on its surface?

How do you distinguish between what you're doing now and what you were doing before, and how do you know that you're not equally deluded but on the other side of the political spectrum?

Yeah, sure. The way that I know I'm not as deluded as I was before is that I did go through a period of delusion when I recognized that I was not a leftist. I immediately went, oh well I must be on the right then, and I self-subscribed myself to the right-wing talking points for quite some time.

And then I don't know what happened, but a moment came to me where I went, wait a second, I must have this propensity to just latch myself onto things because I've just done the same thing on the other side.

And I really had to look within myself and find where do I truly disagree with my previous self and where do I agree with my previous self?

And there are plenty of back and forth that we'll get into with the employees here at PragerU where we disagree on many things, and that was certainly not an experience that I had when I was working for that left-leading organization.

Now that could be that organization on its own, wrote an article this week talking about how leftist organizations all across the United States are collapsing into themselves because they can't handle any internal dissent.

So I think that — okay, so one of the things you said about Prager was that you get to say what you want and that you can disagree.

And you also implied that imagine that you're trying to make your way, and so first of all you're on the left, you have an oversimplified worldview and then you find out some errors and then bang, you vacillate over to the right and an oversimplified view.

And you find some errors, like what you're doing is you're trying to develop a much more differentiated and detail-oriented political philosophy, right? Because that’s part of being matured and wise.

And so you're going to oscillate back and forth like that. Now, you said you don't think you're merely being an activist now because you're working for an organization where disagreement is actually tolerated or encouraged.

And do the Prager people actually do they let you say what you need to say? Do they encourage you to do that, and how do you know that you're not just pulling yourself into alignment with their views for instrumental reasons?

I mean people have asked me the same questions about my work with The Daily Wire, let's say.

Sure, I’d say it's both tolerated and encouraged and we can be both at the same time. And when I come and do my show, I know that my show is my words, and I know that it's my thoughts.

And I feel comfortable now, whereas I didn't before, saying, you know what, I don't agree with maybe that five-minute video that we put out this week or I don't want to have a certain guest on the show to discuss this sort of view of things, and that is always encouraged and taken to heart.

And they go, okay great! We don't ever want you to put your name on something that is not your thinking or your belief.

So I have much more freedom today than I had before when I was working for that left-leaning organization and I was having these thoughts that were dissidents to the subscribed narrative.

I didn't feel comfortable even saying that or even coming to a point of confrontation with anybody because I knew that my job was contingent upon me believing the list of things that I was meant to believe.

And now I get to come and say, ah, I don't think I agree with you on that, and it's actually taken in stride and people want to talk about it.

Okay, okay! So one of the ways you know that you're not merely towing the party line now is that you have a wider range of play available to you without getting into trouble.

Okay, so how else do you steer? Is a good question. How have you learned to distinguish between those words that are yours and those words that merely make you a mouthpiece of an ideology?

Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm not afraid to disagree. I think if I was your typical right-leaning conservative person, I would be talking about, I don’t know, Christianity. I don't happen to be a religious person. I'm agnostic, atheist, I guess is what you would say, and I always just try to take in information and really deduce down where people are right, where people are wrong on both sides of things.

Like, I’ll take in both narratives, both the left and the right, and see, okay, where are they right on this and where are they wrong and why is that the case.

And on the right, where are they right on this and where are they wrong and that's the case. And I take it upon myself to hopefully be even-handed in criticism of both sides.

So there will be episodes that conservatives watch my show, and they go, I absolutely do not agree with anything you said, and here's why, and there's episodes that I put out where leftists disagree with what I have to say.

So I don't know that I have a particular process for discerning whether or not I'm truly using the words that come from my own mind, but I can certainly tell that with reaction to the content that I'm saying that, well, I must be saying what's true to myself because I'm pissing off two groups of people equally.

Okay, well that seems to be a reasonable marker.

I mean you said you also implied something as we talked. You said that when you were a mouthpiece for the party line as a young person a lot of the time you were miserable and angry, and you had a chip on your shoulder, and you saw a lot of hostility in the world.

And so, and there isn't any evidence of that in the way that you conduct yourself, certainly not in this discussion and not when I saw you on stage.

Like you don't seem to be carrying around a lot of bitterness and resentment and so, you know, I have this byline on my email response, "Truth is the antidote to suffering." And you know one of the things that I think is reasonable is to note that if you are using your own words, that gives you a sense of solidity, internal solidity and confidence in what you're saying.

Like there's an element that's foundational there. It doesn't have that sense of falseness and narcissistic pride that goes along with claiming false moral virtue for merely mouthing the dictates of a given ideology.

Sure, you know what? That's a very great point, and that's something that hadn't come to mind.

Yeah, I would say I am far more sound in myself and far more comfortable, I think, with admitting that I was wrong or saying I don't know when it comes to right.

Right? Whereas before, you would never hear me say I don't know, which is really scary to think about in retrospect.

And now I'm so comfortable looking at an issue and going, you know what? I don't know!

Yeah, well, there's two terrors there, right? There is a terror in not knowing because it means you have to face your ignorance, and there's no shortage of that.

But there's also that totalitarian terror, which is the opposite to that, which is, well, if I had my act together I would have an answer for everything.

And that's a hell of a burden, especially when you're 15 because, or 16 it's like, well, what the hell do you know?

And it's hard to understand that there's actually a relief in being able to throw up your hands and say well, I don't know what the answer to that is, and I could go investigate.

But it's also okay that I don't know, and then that opens up doors of exploration for me.

But you know this is something I learned when I was probably about your age, you know, and maybe you'd find it useful.

I understood — it was in 1985 to ’83, something like that, so I was about 21, yeah, I just got exactly your age. I like to win arguments, you know?

And I had got a lot of positive attention for being smart and being verbal when I was a kid, and so I had a fair bit of, let's say, intellectual pride, which I doubt I've shaken completely.

And I like to be able to win arguments, and I could usually win an argument if I set out to do so, and so I thought that if you won an argument, you were right.

And certainly being married has disabused me of that notion, by the way.

And then I realized that I was often saying things just so that I would win arguments and be right. And then I also noticed that when I was doing that, I had a deep sense of falsehood and disquiet, right?

And I felt that when I was really paying attention I could see that doing that made me weak. It made me weak and defensive and prideful and narcissistic, all of those things.

And then insistent that I was right and kind of totalitarian.

And so then I started to listen to what I was saying and to feel it out. And I was reading Carl Rogers at the same time because I was starting to get interested in the clinical world, and he talked about the necessity of authenticity.

And he believed that your actions and your words should be in alignment, but not only that, that your physiological being and your word should be in alignment.

He said if you paid enough attention, you could tell when you were, let's say, not being true to your core self, something like that.

And for me, that manifested itself as a sense of weakness. And so I kind of learned to feel my way along. I always think about it as sort of trying to find — imagine you're walking across a giant swamp, and there are stones under the surface, but you can't see them in the murky water.

But you can feel them out, so you can feel where you could step, you could take the next step and find solid ground. And you can do that with your words, you know?

You can feel, and I think that's a test for the authenticity and the truth of the words is that they're not prideful, they're not designed to win, they're designed to provide you with a firm foundation under your feet.

And I think to some degree — well I'm wondering, I suppose, to some degree if that's how you know, to what degree that's how you know, for example, at PragerU when you should hold your ground and say what you need to say.

Certainly I — and it's interesting because I've managed to learn that at least in the political sense when it comes to the job that I do.

But in a personal sense, I still struggle with exactly what you were talking about, sort of feeling the stones and recognizing things in yourself before the words come out of your mouth.

So now, politically, because I've gone through all of this back and forth and really having to contend with myself and with other people, now I'm fine and I'm calm and I'll listen to a story and I'll have this idea of, well, let's wait — let's wait to find more information, even though something immediately wants to attack somebody else.

Let's wait and hear more. Whereas sometimes in my personal life my turnaround on recognizing my defensiveness is about a 24-hour period, which my boyfriend is struggling with right now.

Right, right. Well, that's interesting; you know, that played itself out in our marriage.

And I would say, I'll talk about my wife momentarily, I would say that when we first got married the turnaround for her was about 24 hours years, and she's got that down to about 30 seconds now.

And that's, yeah, so I hope — I hope to be just like her!

Well, you know, if you practice that, you know? And if you practice — and it is that kind of — that's humility, by the way, really! It's like if you listen with humility, you're always listening with the idea that you're probably still pretty stupid, and maybe this person will say something that will make you slightly less stupid if you listen hard enough, right?

And that's such a gift, right? Because if you're stupid, you're going to run into a wall because of it at some point.

And so if someone who's talking to you can tell you where you're stupid, well, what a deal for you!

And the thing that's so interesting about that too is that you're way more likely to be told where you're stupid by someone who doesn't agree with you.

Yes, 100%.

And it's interesting that when I meet people, like protesters who have this very shallow depiction of myself and are telling me that I'm stupid or racist or all these things, for some reason I treat this person who is so far removed from my life with far more compassion than if somebody who I care about is coming forward and saying, hey, you did this stupid thing.

And I don't know if it's because the relationship that I have with the person that is deep and caring has a little bit more sting when criticism is given, and that's why I immediately jump to defense.

Whereas with this person, you know, it doesn't truly matter all that much what somebody on a college campus thinks.

So it's something that I continue to struggle with, but I've turned a two-week period of turnaround into a 24-hour one.

So okay, well that's pretty good. Well, no, that's — no, it should — like if you practice that diligently, you can get to turn around really quick, you know?

And that's really — we were talking about the religious front, you know, that's really a confession and repentance, by the way, that's a compressed...

Well, because the confession is, so first of all, you can think about it as recognition of sin, okay? So what does sin mean technically? It means to miss the mark.

There's two derivations. There's hamartia from the Greek, which was an archery term, so to sin means to miss the mark. And there's one from the Hebrew, which was Chet, if I remember correctly, and it also meant to miss the target.

So imagine that the religious transformation in its microstructure is something like admission of sin, which is well I missed the target. And then there's a confessional element to it, which is here's how I missed the target, you know?

I wasn't aiming at the right target, I wasn't careful enough, etc. And then there's the repentance, which is well I'd rather not do that again. And then the religious vision, at least on the Christian side, and it's not unique to Christianity, is that if you go through that process of recognition of sin, and confession, and repentance, then there's redemption.

And that is, I really think that's the cycle of growth, right? I don't think you ever learn anything important without going through those four things. That's sort of been routinized and made mythological in the religious context, but it's a useful thing to know.

Because that's a place where the learning that you're undertaking and your explicit description of the learning and that religious system of ideation, that's a place where they dovetail.

Yeah, and I can imagine pride is the one thing that is standing as a barrier in a force of those steps.

Yeah, yeah, well good. Well, that's a very astute observation because the precondition for that cycle of transformation is humility.

And you know, there’s — my wife prays this Jesus prayer, and I'm going to mangle it because I don't know it that well, but it's something like, "Jesus Christ, have mercy on my soul, a sinner."

And the Orthodox Christians, some of them pray that continually. And you might say, well, what exactly are they doing? And the answer is, well, they're trying to remind themselves that they're stupid and fallible.

And you might say, well, that sucks because who wants to be reminded constantly that they're stupid and fallible, but if that makes you more attentive and more able to go through this cycle of transformation because now you're attending to the places where you might be in error, then it's a facilitator of growth.

And it is a facilitator of growth to understand that there's a lot more possibility in what you don't know than there is power in what you do know.

Yeah, did — I'm curious, did you ever struggle with pride getting in the way by virtue of having the job that you have? Because so many people are looking to you and taking in your words as very much right in this very dedicated fashion. Does that ever come as a barrier in your personal life with your own argument?

Well, I think I was fortunate, you know in some sense because I didn't become well-known till I was pretty old. Like I was in my mid-50s, you know?

And I'd been a professor at Harvard and at the University of Toronto for 20 years, and so I had a pretty good reputation among my students.

And I had some practice at what that was like, and then I developed a bit of a media following in Ontario, and I got a bit of experience on the broader social landscape before things burst, you know, things burst forward around me.

Now, so I was older when this all happened, and that was helpful. But I also, as I indicated in our conversation, I started to sort a lot of this out when I was about your age.

And